Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Thursday, January 24, 2008

The End of TV as I Knew It

It was one of the great mysteries of my childhood. You changed TV
stations by turning a dial, a dial that started at "2". What
happened to channel 1? So off I went to the library and found out the
ugly truth: Channel 1 contains the entire FM spectrum. Each TV station
took a very wide spectrum to send off their analog signals.

But as of February 2009 the rest of the analog channels will disappear as
well. Today the FCC starts the auction for that spectrum. FCC spectrum
auctions are the poster child for combinatorial auctions where bidders
bet on subsets of goods and have lots of nifty complexity issues. But
I don't want to talk about math today, just want to mourn the analog
space that carried the classic TV shows I watched as a kid. The moon
landing was broadcast live over those airwaves about to be sold off
forever.

Much ado is made about Google entering the bidding. But the spectrum
will likely go to major telecoms like AT&T and Verizon. They will
use the spectrum mainly for high-speed wireless data. And what will we
use that high-speed data for? Watching TV on our cell phones. The
circle will be complete.

6 comments:

Television over phones is one of the least exciting benefits that more spectrum will bring. There is not a giant amount of marginal benefit in watching video on a tiny screen as your battery drains (but this probably won't stop telcos from trying to them to you).

Email and the web is just the tip of the iceberg, think location aware services and the merging of analog and digital communication mechanisms.

Anonymous 1: I believe they said something very similar to that about home computers.

Lance: TV is being rethought in more ways than one. The long awaited/hyped convergence of Internet and TV seems to be happening, and accelerating due to the writers' strike. I posted about this a couple months ago.

While they are at it why not auction off the previous "digital television" spectrum? Consumers are flocking to non-broadcast communication, why not let the market decide? Broadcast communication has downsides. Germany established it's first radio station in 1923[1], and the National Socialist German Workers Party was soon to follow[2]. Anyone here ever spotted a sociology article which explained this with communication complexity?

Interesting that Lance went to a musty old place called the "library" to figure out what happened to Channel 1... if he had typed what is "channel 1" on tv? into his favorite search engine, he would have found this interesting page that gives a nice historical overview of early TV broadcasts, and the story of Channel 1.

Incidentally, one of the things that the article points out is that the price of the first commercial televisions was in the $189--$600 range (unadjusted for inflation, I assume)... about the same order of magnitude of this brilliant and cool device.